Chapter14
Kell
On Saturday morning, while Kell helped his team rake up loose bits of hay and secure the hay bales beneath the canvas tarp that had come undone during the windy night, Marston was nowhere to be found.
Sure, he’d been there at breakfast, but he’d eaten hurriedly and rushed out of the mess tent, presumably to his canopy in the woods.
He didn’t show up for lunch, either, but Kell saw one of the cooks hurrying off with a large paper bag that might have been lunch for Marston, but Kell didn’t want to ask.
Then, much to Kell’s dismay, there was a group counseling session after lunch. The cooks were already rearranging the tables to make room for a circle of folding chairs, and Gabe and Royce were standing at the entrance to the mess tent, so there was no escape that way.
“Do I have to?” asked Kell, and though he knew his voice sounded surly, like he was on the verge of swearing, he felt desperate.
He wanted to go into the woods and find Marston, wanted to sit and watch him work. Wanted to ask a question, any question, so he could hear a slow and considered reply, and get Marston to talk with him that way.
“Yes, you do,” said Gabe. “They’re pretty painless meetings, I hear, and it’s a good chance for you to sit and talk and exchange ideas with your fellow parolees.”
“There’s no getting out of this, I’m afraid,” said Royce. “Besides, it gives the team leads a chance to meet as well. To go over the routine, and anything new that’s upcoming.” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Gabe and I will be in my tent, having iced coffee.”
“What about Marston?” asked Kell before he could stop himself.
“He’ll be there,” said Gabe. “Even though he doesn’t have a team, though that might be changing.”
Gabe didn’t say anything else, but walked off with Royce, who, with his old-fashioned clipboard in his arms, looked like a teacher about to give Gabe instruction in math or something. Which left Kell with nothing to do but sit on one of the folding chairs and smile blankly at the young looking fellow in black trousers and a wrinkled yellow tie as he took the chair directly across from Kell.
“You’re new, right?” asked the young man brightly, perhaps too brightly. He checked the tablet in his hands. “Kelliher Dodson?”
“It’s Kell,” said Kell, keeping it short and crisp because the last thing he wanted to do was get drawn into a private conversation with a stupid fucking counselor.
Counselors were nosy bastards, at least the ones at the prison had been, and they were sometimes mean, and usually way too cheerful for Kell. Luckily, all the other parolees soon stomped their way into the mess tent and took seats in the circle, like they were used to doing this. And also, maybe a little, they just wanted to get it over with.
“Hi, I’m Brendan,” said the stupid fucking counselor.
“Hi, Brendan,” they all said in unison.
While the meeting got underway, Kell just kept quiet until he could figure out the tone of the meeting, whether it would be happy or sad, or everybody would complain or argue, or whatever.
To his surprise, it was pretty upbeat, with the two lunkheads, Duane and Tyson, trying to talk at the same time, and Gordy chiming in when he could.
“And what about you, Wayne?” asked Brendan. “How are you adjusting to having a tent mate after having that tent to yourself?”
It was a mean question to ask because it put Wayne on the spot, and he sat up, his hands in the pockets of his blue jeans turning into fists.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Kell’s quiet, at least, and he isn’t going through my stuff, near as I can figure.”
Kell just rolled his eyes because after even only sixty days in prison, he knew that stealing from another criminal, however tame they might seem, was a good way to get your throat slit in the middle of the night. But he didn’t say anything, and only nodded when the others nodded, and counted the seconds until the meeting was over and he could get back to his regularly scheduled life. And maybe sneak into the woods to find where Marston’s pavilion was.
Except after the meeting, there wasn’t any chance to do that, because Gabe rounded up the team and, with each of them carrying various tools, led them into the pasture among the horses, to the very end, just above where the lake narrowed into a river again. There, he pointed out a clump of what he called Russian olive trees.
“Now, in Colorado, they’re just letting these die out, but here—” He paused to look up along the pasture, at the lake and the gray ridge beyond. “They’re an invasive species and aren’t very pretty, besides, so we’re going to need to dig them up. And collect any scraps or seeds so they don’t continue to grow here. Any questions?”
He looked right at Kell as if he expected Kell would protest or simply not understand. But Kell knew, as he pulled his leather gloves from his back pocket and picked up one of the large clippers, that he was going to have a hard time keeping up.
The ground was hard as it curved downward, going into a little gully before broadening into the bank of the lake. For yards the grass was scrubby, as if the Russian olive trees were soaking up all the water.
As Kell attacked one of the smaller trees, clipping branches close to the trunk while doing his best to avoid the spines and sticky sap, he tried to imagine how it would look, once all the invasive species were dug up and something else was planted. Pine trees, maybe, or just the tall grass that could be found on the other side of the valley, above the switchbacks, where the land broadened and rolled along to the high prairie.
When he was done with one, he moved onto another tree, and behind him, Jonah or Gabe came along with a chainsaw to cut the tree down to the root. After them came Blaze and Gordy, pouring what smelled like strong vinegar all around the sawed-off trunk. It was when they took a water break that Gabe explained why they were doing what they were doing.
